Showing posts with label laws. Show all posts
Showing posts with label laws. Show all posts

19 September 2013

Open Sourcing the UK's Operating System

"Law is the operating system of our society ... So show me the manual!" Not alas, my witty words, but those found on the site Public.Resource.Org, run by the redoubtable Carl Malamud. The basic idea is simple: that laws can only be obeyed if they are truly public, which means freely available, not hidden behind paywalls. After all, how can the phrase "ignorance of the law is no excuse" have any validity when key documents are only available to those with pockets deep enough to afford them?And not just laws: we need case law and associated government regulations too.

On Open Enterprise blog.

15 July 2012

UK Government Wants To Give Itself Power To Change Copyright Law Without Full Parliamentary Scrutiny

A common feature of democracies is that new laws are scrutinized and debated by representatives of the people before they are passed -- the hope being that bad proposals can be amended or discarded. Laws giving governments the power to change other laws with only minimal oversight are therefore generally regarded as a Bad Thing. But that's exactly what the UK government plans to introduce, as this article on the Out-Law.com site explains: 

On Techdirt.

17 July 2007

Open Legislation

Given that it's clear what the source code of democracy is - its laws - an obvious thing to try would be to apply open source techniques to the process of drawing up legislation:

"In the world of open source, your contribution, vetted and approved by your peers, gets committed into the mainline in a completely transparent and accountable process," Amanda McPherson, director of marketing Email Marketing Software - Free Demo for the Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider.

"If Joe Citizen could impact and view the legislative process in the way a Linux developer can, I believe the result would be superior legislation," she said. "Lawmakers would be judged on results, those with the most and best to contribute could do so, and special-interest groups working selfishly would be exposed."

Moreover, there's a technology just waiting for this kind of approach:

"Laws go through all kinds of markups, changes and amendments," Leyden said. "The process has evolved from making those changes on parchment to at least using word-processing documents, but it's not that big a step to think of moving to the next generation of tools and crafting a whole piece of legislation on a wiki."

Interestingly, one of the main voices quoted in these two articles on open legislation is Eben Moglen who - quite unsurprisingly - has many insightful comments on the idea. Yet another reason to read them.

06 May 2006

The Law According to Wikocracy

We've had Openlaw, where anyone can contribute information to the crafting of a legal argument; now we've got Wikocracy, where anyone can edit and revise laws (via Bubblegeneration).